Previous status updates include:
- Level 10: Where I grew up in a vault, chased after my dad, and hightailed it to faux-Alaska for a bit
- Level 20: Where I found my dad, learned of his plan to purify the Capital Wasteland, and got probed by some aliens
And here we are now…Level 30. Experience-wise, I can go no further. I’ve gotten all the perks I can get for my super-duper messiah, and enough ammo to shoot whatever I want, wherever I want, how ever many times I want. Bottle caps up the who-ha, too, thanks to the Fortune Finder perk. Which is a shame, because I now feel like everything from here forward is pointless (maybe that’s too harsh a word), a little less satisfying because there’s no more XP to earn.
[Some vague spoilers to follow]
But let’s talk about what I’ve been up to these past final 10 levels. Well, to start, I “took it back” wherein I, some Brotherhood head honchos, and Liberty Prime stormed against the Enclave in order to retrieve the G.E.C.K. they originally stole from me. This was a pretty epic fight hampered by the fact that I roleplay a sneaky sneak, meaning I basically hung back and watched my friends do damage. After that I continued on to wipe out the Enclave entirely (though, as a few continue to pop up later on in the game, this is not accurate), and then decided it was time for a change of scenery.
Enter: Point Lookout, Maryland.
What a creepy and quiet place. Now, the bombs did not drop in Maryland, but the state certainly has been affected by radiation. There’s shovel-weilding inbreds and a host of ghouls, as well as an abandoned amusement park pier and some unnerving caves full of coffins and booby-traps (“That’s what I said, booby-traps.”). The main missions involve protecting a mansion, and then picking a side between a foul-mouthed ghoul and Mother Brain. I was level 25 when I arrived, and I found it harder in the beginning and a breeze to complete come the end. It’s really more of the same, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing when it comes to Fallout 3, but I would’ve liked more enemy variety and quest choices in this DLC. There’s some sidequests which I started, but left to the wayside, returning to the Capital Wasteland to finish up some miscellaneous tasks.
That’s right. Miscellaneous tasks…at this point, it’s all I have left besides a few quests which I won’t do until I replay as an evil-doer (specifically, “Strictly Business” and “You Gotta Shoot ‘Em in the Head”) . I’m missing two Bobbleheads at the moment, need to kill three more Super Mutant Behemoths, and win some more Speech challenges. Once those are done, I’m starting all over to play Fallout 3 completely different. And this time I mean it because I said the same with Fable 2, but just found it to be the same game with a slightly different outlook. Evil woman avatar is basically good male avatar that scares people away. No terrible punishments. I really do get the impression that, in Fallout 3, your character’s actions (i.e., your actions) truly have consequences, making the world real, making the experience real.
And that’s it for now. I absolutely love this game, probably the first I’ve absolutely loved in awhile since Suikoden II and Super Metroid, and I can most certainly assure you I’ll be back once more to summarize the entire experience Fallout 3 brings to the player, and to the genre. Don’t think I’ll do status updates for the evil character though. Unless she holds a Chinese assault rifle to my head, that is.
Grinding Down 